Taking it all in

Happy Monday everyone, I hope that you all had a great and relaxing weekend. Even if it wasn’t relaxing, I hope that it was still great. We had two beautiful days in a row here in Pittsburgh, which hasn’t happened for months. More storms to come this week, but for now, we are enjoying the nice weather.

I was thinking about maybe starting some kind of a theme day on the blog, given that I have posted candids on consecutive Mondays. I’m not sure how many I will be able to post in a row, as I have a very limited backlog of them, but I’ll give it a shot. Today, I introduce Candid Mondays.

Back to Mt. Washington we go, to continue with shots from Mothers’ day a few weeks ago. Like I’ve said before, I had the telephoto lens on for most of the day/evening, trying to branch out from my current wide angle addiction and this is one of the results. I was heading back down Grandview Avenue, the main drag through the hill top community to get some HDRs from the very overlook that these two were standing on. Unlike the candid I posted last Monday, which was a hurry up and get the camera up as fast I could shot, this was a little bit easier to capture.

Simple processing here. Opened the RAW in Photoshop, desaturated the entire image and increased the vibrance. Brought back some of the saturation of the reds and greens, and increased both the black levels and overall contrast. Added a very slight Tonal Contrast filter to everything but the sky, a Pro Contrast filter to the entire image, and the Hollywood Effect in onOne software to polish to it.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the inaugural Candid Monday. Back to the HDRs tomorrow.

Nice work as usual, Dave!
Lots to see in this image and I agree with Jim, the sense of scale really makes this an awesome view.

I think you and I are sharing the same weather, it’s been rainy any generally pretty crappy of late here in Maryland. Just came off of 8 straight days of stormy weather, although the weekend was great for the Preskness Stakes. :-)